Surely Canter & Siegel deserve first place. I was priviledged to be one of just thousands of people to inform them that their "green card lottery" usenet post was inappropriate when I first saw it in a comp.sys. newsgroup. Turns out everyone else on usenet had the same idea - it took out the mail server of one of the larger ISPs of the time. This was the seminal spam event - the term was coined because of this event.
